Cardiff’s branch of Food Not Bombs recently celebrated their fifth anniversary, are the people of Cardiff understanding the group’s message?
The Food Not Bombs stall features many banners.
Serving food to anyone for free behind Cardiff Market every Friday, Food Not Bombs (FNB) hopes to spread the message that without war more people could be better fed.
The group has served food out to Cardiff for five years now but have they convinced people of the connection between food and war?
FNB takes food donations from all sorts of places; allotments, shops, homes and people donating off the street. This then gets used to make vegan meals.
One server at FNB believes they manage to feed around 80 people a day.
The group sees themselves as a collective with no leaders and as such believed that names weren’t important.
One FNB member said that they serve “The Homeless, tourists and all kinds of people really.”
Food Not Bombs set up their stall for serving every Friday.
But food is not the only aspect of FNB their political motivations are also a driving force. Topics such as Chelsea Manning (who lived in Wales briefly) come up at the stall.
The same FNB member believed the message was simple: “make food not war.” He went further to say that “weapons we don’t even use are a waste of money that could be spent on feeding the population.”
FREE FOOD at the back of Cardiff’s Central Market TODAY at 12:30pm! Delicious warm carrot, squash & coriander soup! pic.twitter.com/u1Tye7rmOb
— FoodNotBombs Cardiff (@FNBCardiff) February 20, 2015
But are the people FNB are serving making the same connection?
One regular visitor to FNB’s food stall who understood the link was Donald who said, “Food not bombs means freedom not to blow ourselves up and use those resources elsewhere, like food.”
But the relation between food and war was not so easily understood by some people.
Another visitor to the stall was unsure of what ‘food not bombs’ meant precisely. However they did know that the group stood for non-violence and peace.
Despite this Food Not Bombs is still going strong in Cardiff and its message will always be understood by some.
